Tree Climbing For Beginners

by Joyia Marie

  First, let me give you some history. You see, back before I met Harold. I lived in a loft, made my living as a writer, and was very happy. Then my mother in all her wisdom, decided to fix that and introduced me to Harold. For some reason known only to God, I fell in love with the jerk and said yes to his half-assed proposal of marriage.

  Subsequently, I moved to the suburbs in the house his parents gave us for a wedding gift but I didn’t give up the loft. I kept it. Much to Harold’s dismay and disgust, I kept it. For years, I’ve used it as my own little writer’s retreat. From time to time, I retreat to my retreat to work. Usually during the day while the kids are at school, but occasionally at night and even more occasionally longer.

  Therefore, the kids are used to me taking off for a bit. I’m sure if they knew this bit was going to be significantly longer than my other bits, I might still be at the house with a twin wrapped around each leg. On the other hand, maybe not, nowadays, it’s hard to predict.

  I shook off the thought as I pulled into the garage at my loft. The loft was converted from a warehouse so it was like a little slice of New York right in Fort Worth, Texas. I always felt very Jenifer Beals in Flashdance when I arrived. I got out my suitcase and trudged to the big steel door that was the front door to my loft.

  There was no industrial elevator, but the building didn’t need one. It was a three-story building they had sliced into lofts and sold pretty much as is. I hadn’t done much with mine other than the basics. It had electricity, a phone, and internet.

  There was a rudimentary kitchen, but with the loft’s downtown location, I couldn’t see me doing much cooking. Actually, I didn’t think I’d be doing much driving either. I could walk or catch the bus to wherever I might need to go easier than attempting to find parking.

  I tossed my suitcase on the futon that would act as a couch and bed until I brought in more furniture. The only place that was completely set up was my office area with my desk, chair, bookcase, and filing cabinet. I had it tucked into a corner of the room with the desk facing out into the main area.

  I sighed as I sank down next to my suitcase. I wasn’t sure what was in it. Packing was more symbolic than practical. My eyes welled up as I recounted tonight, but I blinked the tears away. I’m not a crier. I hadn’t cried during labor when I brought my babies into the world and I damn sure wouldn’t be crying over my lying jackass of a soon to be ex-husband.

  I pulled out my cell phone surprised it wasn’t already ringing off the hook with Harold trying to get me to return. Good luck with that, I thought. I got out first and he was stuck.

  Harold was now officially an asshole, but I didn’t doubt his love for his kids. It might be a distant, absent kind of love, but it was love nonetheless. I envied my kids that, it was more than I had ever gotten from my father, whoever that poor bastard might be.

  I wearily set my suitcase on the floor, unpacking could wait until the morning. I flipped open the old cedar chest I used as a makeshift coffee table and got out the linens to make up the futon. I went into the bathroom, took a quick shower, then emerged from bed, in an old T-shirt, that had the caption, ‘Life is rough, wear a fucking helmet’, under a picture of an old World War 2 helmet.

  Truer words were never spoken, I thought, as I shut off the lights and curled up on the futon. The loft was plunged into darkness other than the light that came from the streetlights outside through the big floor to ceiling windows.

  The windows were glass blocks that let in light, but still provided privacy. I had never seen the need for window coverings. From time to time while I was there I would see a curious face pressed against the glass blocks, but I couldn’t make out any features so I figured neither could they.

  The loft was curiously quiet, a fact I had never noticed before. Usually when I spent the night at the loft by the time I fell onto the futon, I was so exhausted John Sousa and his band could have been practicing in my living room and I never would have noticed.

  I sighed and pushed tonight’s drama out of my mind. I had told Harold he had a busy day ahead, but I had a feeling mine was going to be just as busy. I needed to get the loft set up as an actual living space. I needed to call my agent and let her know I was finally ready to come out of the literary closet. Busy, busy, day, I thought as I slowly drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter Three: Harold

  Harold Peterson stared at the closed wooden door in horror. How has this gone so badly so quickly? He had expected Helen to be upset when he broke the news to her, but this hadn’t even crossed his mind as a possibility. What kind of mother left their children?

  Women stayed, men left, and that’s just the way it was. Okay, the men were considered assholes and the women saints, but that’s just the way it was. He looked at the door again and thought Helen hadn’t gotten the memo. He shouldn’t be that surprised. Helen had always marched to the beat of her own drummer.

  He looked up when he spotted the twins creeping down the stairs, staring at him as if they were just figuring out something was different about this time. The kids knew Helen took off for her writing jags or just to get some ‘me’ time so her leaving wasn’t a shock. However, this was the first time he had stared at the door as if it was on the last helicopter out of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.

  “You okay, Daddy?” Tonya asked, the twins official spokesperson.

  Harold nodded and turned away from the door. If Helen was kidding or just yanking his chain, she’d be back by now. In addition, he was sure he heard her car speeding away like the getaway driver after a bank heist. But then again, Helen wasn’t much for gestures. If she said she was leaving then he could put down money on it.

  “Yes, honey, just missing your mother,” he said after clearing his throat.

  Truer words were never spoken. He expected to experience some kind of angst after he and Helen finally split, but not this soon and not this acute. Moreover, he expected it to come after he was ensconced in Jillian’s tender embrace at her apartment. Not here with his children looking at him as if they had never seen him before

  “Like she always tells us, she’ll be back before you know it,” Tonya said briskly.

  His daughter was the most practical child he had ever met. She was her mother’s child to her toes but she took Helen's pragmatism to a completely new level. The only thing that could truly get her worked up was something happening to her twin and even then, she took care of the problem quickly, quietly and efficiently.

  Harold still had no idea what she did to Billy Smith down the street. The little boy used to terrorize Tony on the few occasions he could catch Tony without his sister in tow. Harold saw a couple of incidents, but stayed out of it, thinking his son needed to learn to fight his own battles.

  Tonya didn’t agree because one day she got wind of it and did… something to Billy and he studiously avoided the siblings ever since. Harold didn’t know what or when this occurred, but he did know the next time he looked out the window and saw Billy out there and Tony was alone, the boy had turned tail and run the other way.

  Something about that had his daughter’s fingerprints all over it. Harold never asked her about it, but her eyes would look at him from time to time with this vague disapproval. As if she knew, he had known and failed to act or at the very least inform her.

  “Shouldn’t you two be in bed?” he said to avoid getting into the whole question of Helen’s absence. He had the feeling they were going to notice this time.

  “Yes, Daddy, we’re just heading that way,” Tonya said brightly, giving him a long considering look.

  A look that said ‘I know something is going on and you’d better tell me before I find out and do something worse to you than I did to Billy Smith’. Harold shook off the thought. This was his daughter, not a sociopath. She’d be upset when she found out about him and her mother separating but she’d get over it. He hoped.

  Tonya gave him another look before she and her brother headed back upstairs. They were doing that thing where
they walked in time with each other that really set his teeth on edge. Why had he been ‘blessed’ with twins, he thought for the nth time since he first found out Helen was expecting them.

  He still had no idea where they came from. He shook his head as they lock-stepped up the stairs. He knew where they came from. He was in the delivery room when Helen gave birth to them. Reluctantly there, but there, so he knew they were their children.

  At least hers, he thought darkly before shaking that thought off as well. They were his kids. Tonya looked just like an old picture of his mother as a child and Tony was the picture of him as a child. Therefore, their paternity was not in doubt.

  It was the twin thing, he thought, still shocked after all these years. Twins did not run in his family or in what he knew of Helen’s family. Then again, with her father pulling a runner so he could come from a family full of multiple births, and two were the least you could hope for at a time. He shivered at the thought.

  Harold walked into the bedroom and undressed. He slipped into the bed and allowed the thought to come that he would never ever speak aloud. He thought twins, not his twins, but the idea of twins, were creepy. The idea of any more babies than that at a time made his flesh crawl.

  Humans should come one at a time not in litters like puppies and to him anything over one was a litter. He grinned at the idea of Helen and her litter of babies. Then he frowned. If there were a way, he would swear Helen had done it on purpose.

  However, they hadn’t been on fertility treatments because if they had needed it, he would have been out of luck. Helen was ambivalent at best about the whole baby question and getting her to go the extra mile would have been out of the question.

  He frowned unsure how the question of children, never came up during his courtship of Helen. He just assumed all women wanted babies, especially married women. If not, then why get married? Why not just buy an expensive dress, have a big party, and leave the government out of it?

  He didn’t find out Helen was adamantly against having children until they had been married a year. By then he figured the honeymoon was over and on to the next phase of their married life. He was floored when Helen steadfastly refused to discuss it.

  “You never said you wanted children,” Helen accused, a betrayed look on her face.

  “You never said you didn’t,” he shot back, shocked to his toes.

  What kind of woman didn’t want children? The kind that can leave them behind, he sarcastically answered the question. Maybe Helen wasn’t being quite so crazy to leave him with the children he had all but demanded she have.

  He brushed the thought aside. He hadn’t held her down and forcibly impregnated her. She had come around… eventually.

  Getting Helen to the point of agreeing to have a child had taken months, but once Harold got that concession then he went for broke. He tried a crazy number like six just to get her to agree to more than one because after being an only child he wouldn’t wish that on his own kid. No kid needs all of two adults’ attention. It puts too much pressure on the kid, a fact to which he could attest.

  The bargaining was hot and heavy after that and they went after it like two world leaders trying to negotiate peace, but they finally settled on two, with the option of a third if they hadn’t gotten one of each sex in the first two. After that, the womb closed with Helen threatening to tie herself to the delivery bed until she got a tubal ligation. She wanted the question of children settled for all time, but she didn’t want a beard in the bargain so a hysterectomy was out of the question.

  Therefore, Helen went off her birth control and the waiting game began. It couldn’t even be called a waiting game as Helen had conceived almost immediately. It was as if her womb denied all these years leaped on its time to shine.

  Helen conceived and at six weeks looked almost three months pregnant. The doctor did an ultrasound and delivered the happy news that Helen was carrying twins. Harold hid a smile of triumph even if the idea of twins made him a little leery. It looked like he’d be getting his three kids anyway. In addition, Helen would only have to endure two pregnancies to make it happen.

  Endure was right, Helen was not a happy pregnant woman. She had morning sickness for the first three months and her Braxton Hicks contractions started at month five. By month six, she was on bed rest and her face assumed this resentful cast every time she looked at her husband. His parents paid for a day nurse as Helen’s mother was off somewhere taking pictures and Helen swore to do jumping jacks if he tried to get his mother to take on the job.

  For the next two months, the only times Helen moved out of the bed was to go to the bathroom, take a shower, or go to the doctor. Harold moved into the guest room as Helen’s burgeoning body took up more and more room on the queen-sized bed. Harold started to suggest them getting a king-sized bed, but decided a break from Helen’s brooding glare would be welcome.

  Harold made himself comfortable with the idea of twins, but the question was twin what? The babies were disgracefully shy and the doctor could never get them to show what they were. Toward the end, the mixture of arms and legs in such a crowded space made Harold a bit queasy, so he resigned himself to finding out with the rest of the world.

  Finally, at 38 weeks the doctor decided to pull the plug. The twins were big enough to be born and Helen looked like she was about to pop. Harold stopped looking at her stomach because the sight of an elbow or a foot pressing through the thin skin of her abdomen reminded him of a horror movie he saw as a kid.

  The big day arrived, the doctor induced Helen’s labor with medication, and when that didn’t work, he broke her waters. Helen clung to Harold like a limpet, not out of any true need of him, he thought, but because she was determined to make him undergo the ‘miracle’ of childbirth with her.

  Harold would have rather stood in the hall with the rest of the fathers. However, he had a sinking feeling if he did manage to make a break for it, Helen would chase him down even if that meant giving birth in the hall.

  Breaking the waters seemed to turn the tide and soon Helen delivered a baby girl. Harold bit back a sigh of disappointment at two girls, but he still had his shot at a boy the next time. The doctor plopped the slimy baby onto Helen’s chest, for a cuddle before the neonatal team swept in and whisked her away and went back to work.

  The next ten minutes went by a bit slowly to Harold’s memory. He didn’t understand what the holdup was. The first baby had blazed the trail; all the second had to do was follow the path. ‘Head toward the light’, he thought to the other baby that was dawdling in his opinion.

  Finally, with a mighty push Helen expelled the second child and lay back with a justifiably exhausted look on her face. She had wanted a c-section, but the insurance demanded a trial of labor before resorting to extraordinary measures. In Harold’s opinion, twins warranted Helen being able to deliver any way she chose to include a man playing a zither and an Indian swami passing a hookah filled with opium.

  Harold wasn’t choosy about how his children made their appearance. He thought the women who made so much over giving birth naturally needed to get a life. If he had to push something that big out of an opening that small, he’d insist on being higher than a rock band on the opening night of a new tour.

  “Would you look at that,” the doctor said in pleased astonishment. Harold looked over apprehensively. Surely, if there was something extra or missing, the doctor wouldn’t sound so pleased. Unless the doctor thought they might name whatever new abnormality afflicting their child after him.

  “One of each,” the doctor exclaimed ending Harold’s confusion at what he was seeing. Harold was so convinced he was having two daughters, he took his son’s penis for a second umbilical cord. That’s my boy, Harold thought proudly. Then he looked at his wife to share his joy.

  The look of unholy glee and the big smile he hadn’t seen in months sapped a little of his joy away. Good grief, he had only asked her for children not kidneys. Women had children for all kinds of reasons eve
ryday including making their husbands happy. Couldn’t she be happy for him if not with him?

  “Happy, now?” Helen husked before laying back and passing out. Harold wondered at her words and then remembered. She did what she promised and in record time no less. One pregnancy, two babies, one of each. Helen was nothing if not efficient, but even he could not figure how she could have engineered this. He knew logically she couldn’t have but still in the wee small hours of the night, he wondered.

  Chapter Four: Harold

  Harold’s cell phone rang jolting out of his memories and his ruminations about twins especially his. It was all quiet up there, which he hoped meant the children were asleep and not plotting his eventual demise. Helen might be happy to leave the children with him, but he had his doubts the twins, especially one twin, would be happy about being left. Harold shuddered to think what Tonya might do when she found out she was abandoned with her father.

  The phone rang again and Harold looked at the display hoping to see Helen’s number and sighed when he saw Jillian’s instead. He looked at the clock and sighed again when he saw he was hours overdue his arrival at her home. Then he felt a flare of anger for her calling him at home, she knew better.

  Actually, when he thought about it, Jillian was surprisingly well versed with the rules of a clandestine affair. He put that thought aside for further consideration as he thought about how to handle this call. Jillian was sure to be upset whether he answered now or in the morning and at least in the morning he could take this call in his office.

  That didn’t preclude Jillian showing up and waiting for him in his office. So far, he had managed to keep his affair undercover, but he thought his assistant, Grace, might know and if she knew then so did everyone else. Grace was a good assistant but she was a gossip nonpareil.

  He sighed when the phone rang again, somehow sounding irritated. Now or then, he’d have to deal with her so might as well be now. Surely, he’d hear the twins if they came downstairs and they had been quiet for a while so he was reasonably sure they were asleep.